Doctoral Dissertation Research: Health Behaviors and Social Networks

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Nicholas ChristakisMark Pachucki Harvard University While it is commonly accepted that what we eat affects our well-being, existing research that seeks to specify causal relationships between eating behaviors and health outcomes has largely ignored the role of social connections between individuals. To what extent do our specific food consumption patterns depend on the taste preferences of people to whom we are directly (or indirectly) connected? The specific goals of this research are to evaluate: (a) the extent to which taste preferences spread through a population; (b) interrelationships between social status and food choice; and (c) the roles that social ties play in mediating food choice and health conditions such as obesity and cardiovascular disease. The question of how food choices and our health are connected is a particularly rich area to study mechanisms relating to taste. Social scientists have done a great deal of work in recent years to systematically document the properties of cultural preference formation and how human interaction influences choice, but most of this research has not considered the most literal interpretation of taste: the taste for food. By synthesizing unusually complete data on health outcomes, social ties, and eating behaviors, this research will elaborate relationships between eating behaviors, network characteristics, and health outcomes over a 20-year period. Hypotheses concerning taste transmission and strength of social ties are generated by from sociological research of taste preferences, social networks, inequality, and biological theories of diet, nutrition, and disease. Latent variable methods will be used to characterize eating patterns; longitudinal regression methods will be used to assess strength and directionality of relationships between food choice, social ties, and health; statistical network methods will be used to estimate influence of social ties on taste diffusion. By looking quantitatively at the diffusion of innovation of our tastes for food, this research is a fresh approach for studying the interconnectedness of culture and social networks. With growing concern for the alarming rise in obesity and cardiovascular disease, this project also has important public health implications. A better understanding of the social mechanisms that underlie these health conditions can point to more effective behavioral interventions to address modifiable risk factors for disease. In addition to elaborating mechanisms by which social norms can change in a given population, this research has the broader potential to make the public think more critically about not just what, but how, it eats.